Disaster and emergency situations can arise at any time or place with the potential of endangering lives and damaging community infrastructure. Public officials have the responsibility of giving public directions and issuing public alerts or early warnings in the event of such emergencies. Furthermore, in the private sector there is interest in disseminating information in the form of alerts or warnings to individuals. Diverse media, such as television, radio, public telephony systems (satellite, land-line and wireless), electronic billboards, and the Internet for example, are available to distribute public alerts.
Traditionally, sirens, radio and television have been the primary means for alerting the public. For example, there is a system called EAS (Emergency Alert System), which is used by the United States Government. In this system, alerts are distributed via over-the-air broadcast signals and cable systems. This is a hierarchical trickle down distribution system where alerts are relayed down a hierarchical chain. In such a model important messages may be lost along the chain. For example, radio and television stations sometimes decide not to air messages or delay the messages. Furthermore, traditional media such as television and radio have limited daytime audiences since many people who are at work do not have access to radio or television.
In recent years, satellite-based receivers as well as automated phone dialers have also been used for emergency public alerting and warning. More recently, the Internet has emerged as a complementary means for issuing real-time secure alerts, especially during working hours in large urban centers.
Email-based public alerting provides one mechanism for disseminating alerts. However, this approach of alerting is not effective since people tend not to read emails immediately. In addition, emails can be easily spoofed to cause false alarms and panic. Furthermore, in an email approach to distributing alerts bulk emails are sent to subscribers and anti-spam software used by the subscribers can accidentally block important alerting messages.
There are systems that use modern technologies, such as the Internet and cellular networks, to directly deliver alerts to workstations and mobile handsets of wireless subscribers. For example, there are satellite based warning systems that provide mechanisms for disseminating alerts from a primary station to a secondary station for broadcast. However, such systems are not efficient in providing direct alerting to end-users.
There are few Internet-based public alerting systems. Most of such systems were initially developed as messaging systems, and they are limited in the number of clients they can serve. This imposes serious limitations on the scalability of these systems. In addition, there are no inherent security features in the existing alerting systems to provide secure alerting functionality.
A number of messaging systems have been adapted for use in dissemination of public alerts to end-users. These systems were originally designed for chat client based environments and are limited in their scalability.
Therefore, there is a need in the industry for the development of an improved and more efficient alert system and method for reaching a large number of users in a short period of time.